It wouldn’t matter really, whatever team we have will lose on penalties in the quarter finals.

England 40 comps 42 medals
Wales 3 comps 3 medals
NI 0 comps 0 medals
Scot 1 person 3 medals

Well done England and the others tried hard !

The BBc website has a medal map with a bio of each winner.
The individual bios as it happens mention the nationality of only 4 of the above… !

Your observation on Nation referencing is quite right and is a deliberate BBC policy to “promote social cohesion ” , raise “cultural awareness” and observe “ethnic neutrality”.

These dictats are in compliance the normal EU directives you wil be pleased to read.

Most English people want an English Parliament.
Etc. etc.

Its ony natural that sport will follow.

The IOC want Britain to field a British soccer team at the 2012 games but Scotland Wales and N.Ireland refuse to take part. Any British team will be made up of English players! That’s clearly nonsense and I hope the FA will see sense and refuse to participate. In any case if Britain did enter a team the selection process would be a nightmare.

Just as GB competes in the Olympic, but separate English, Welsh, etc. teams in the Commonwealth games, it might be that that a GB football team would only compete in the World Cup with Scotland, Wales etc. still trying for the European Cup (which they have not qualified for recently).

However, having said that, it is good to beat the Aussies.

Reply: Not European nations, but European governments who seek to boss us into submission to their federalist bureaucracy.

Another thought: The Olympics have been hijacked by an awful lot of nasty governments. I am sure we are all aware of the Nazi Olympics.
But there were the ghastly Communist athletes who would have been funny – the bearded woman – if they had not been so threatening and, yes, terrifying, at the time.
China, of course, we are told, is totally different because it has changed.

Fascinating to see the Socialist Brown trying, desperately to muscle in here.

I was very pleased when, early on, a female cyclist was so ecstatic at winning she was unable to respond to the BBC commentators banal questions. No ready prepared statement carefully honed by a dozen PRs and spinmeisters.

It is all such an antidote to the past decade of vacuous reality star celebrity drivel. It’s also in stark contrast to a government that believes all that is necessary is to deceive people into believing everything is wonderful is to constantly tell them it is so, whilst citing endless ‘tractor production’ statistics. They don’t quite seem to arrived at the moment of revelation that this doesn’t work, but this coming. Along with the realisation that you simply cannot make everyone a winner by eradicating losers.

One thing I can’t stand is this constant ‘Team GB’ nonsense. As the games have progressed it has become increasingly obvious that they represent Great Britain, and it is a unique country that was, and despite everything, still is well named.

I prefer the European nations, even the bad ones, over the EU.
If they joined together and competed as the EU then i would delight in seeing us beat them.

If the EU was a country (Heaven Forbid!) it would win the medal table but could you ever imagine an athlete eagerly seeking from the crowd an EU flag to hold above their heads in the manner that athletes proudly parade their national flags?

In general I feel a lot more commonality with the english speaking Commonwealth (& at a push America) than with the EU & wish we put as much effort into making it a real entity as we have for the EU.

Hoorah for Empire Free Trade.

But I have to say that my pleasure, and indeed astonishment, is that we are (at the time of writing) also beating Russia and a unified Germany. From a small boy, watching the Olympics in black and white, I have grown used to the dominance of the USSR and Soviet Bloc countries such as GDR beating us. West Germany always used to beat us as well.

But there is clearly room for improvement. I am sure that our atheletics could be improved after a lot more work. But I have no idea how we are doing in shooting sports, because they are never reported in the mainstream media. I suspect that so-called minority sports have been underfunded and under encouraged for politically correct reasons. It is surely time to shake this up, starting with law changes in firearms.

great affection for the people of places like new zealand, and how much closer in the heart to them we are than the folk living a few miles away in calais, not politically correct but true

makes me very sad to see the visa nonsense we impose on these good folk when the ever expanding europe allows ever more people to enter freely

the peoples map of the world is so very different to the one politicians draw

rock stars and their roadies also have a different slant on the world, having been in so many countries on tour, i always favour their view of places over the press and politicians, cos they base their findings on evidence and first hand experience

http://blogs.smh.com.au/olympics/johnbirmingham/2008/08/20/thepomsareba.html

I also read a more serious piece too in the Australian press about all the funding of sport by different countries now becoming a spiralling arms war in which each country spends ever more for less return in the form of medals.

The country I am glad to see us ahead of is Russia, and perhaps Germany. Any country that can end up with more medals than all other countries of similar or less population is doing really well. On that basis GB, Australia and indeed the US and China can all be proud.

http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

Reply: Is that easy to prove? The Osborne speech provides a devastating critique of how the Labour years have been bad for the poor.